Weicker Honored For Political Courage

Kennedy Library Gives Award

Award Cites Weicker's Political Courage In Budget Fight

BOSTON — As he accepted the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. said Thursday that the honor symbolizes the timidity of his peers as much as his own courage.

Weicker, saluted for his successful six-month battle last year to impose a wildly unpopular income tax in Connecticut, said his selection is partly a measure of the paucity of political courage in America.

"I think it says a great deal," said Weicker, who proposed the income tax a month after taking office. "I think it says a great deal to the extent that decisions aren't being made."

Weicker choked with emotion as the late president's children, Caroline B. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., handed him a sterling silver lantern emblematic of the award given annually to public officials chosen by the Kennedy Library Foundation. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis looked on.

"This occasion makes the rough-and-tumble of public service worthwhile," said Weicker, who was hanged in effigy during an anti-tax rally in October that attracted at least 40,000 protesters to the Connecticut Capitol.

But his show of emotion was brief.

In comments before, during and after the award ceremony at the Kennedy Library, Weicker happily played the role of the scold before the local and national press.

He decried the negativism and paralysis he sees plaguing politics, while still extolling politics as a noble profession that should be drawing the best and the brightest.

"I am proud to be a politician in a free society," he said.

Caroline Kennedy was less comfortable in the limelight.

Kennedy, whose childhood photo album was Life magazine, is now a 34-year-old lawyer and president of the Kennedy Library Foundation. She is married and the mother of two girls, ages 4 and 2.

To mark the 75th anniversary of her father's birth -- and to draw attention from the circumstances of his death to the

accomplishments of his life -- the usually private woman has sought publicity.

"My father's legacy, by Caroline Kennedy" was the headline on this week's Newsweek cover. She and her brother also consented to long interviews last week on the ABC news program "Primetime Live."

In Newsweek, she wrote: "Young people in particular have no recollection of my father and of the idealism and enthusiasm for public service he inspired. And it is this larger idea -- the shining message of his life -- that is being threatened."

Thursday, seated next to Weicker during a brief interview, she quietly said that too much attention was being paid to her father's death, an apparent reference to Oliver Stone's depiction of an assassination conspiracy in his movie "JFK."

"Both my brother and I, we took a deliberate decision, a difficult decision to decide to do this, the publicity we've done this year," she said. "I think people are happy we've decided to speak out a little bit more."

Asked to expand on something she wrote in Newsweek -- how she also was motivated by a belief that her father's name was being exploited in a way insulting to his presidency -- Kennedy would only talk about her desire to see young people motivated by her father's legacy.

"What we really like to focus on is the issues that he cared about, which are public service and the ability and courage to make tough decisions," she said. Then she added, "So that's what I'd like to focus on."

Kennedy said the award given to Weicker, named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by her father, "Profiles in Courage," was intended to improve the image of the political life.

"It's only getting worse, so anything we can do to help we are happy to do," she said.

The award includes a $25,000 cash prize. Weicker has not said what he will do with it, other than to say the state of Connecticut will get its share thanks to the state income tax.

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who served with Weicker in the Senate, delivered a speech introducing Weicker and explaining his selection for the third annual award.

"For 18 years in the U.S. Senate, Lowell Weicker was a daily profile in courage," Kennedy said, describing how Weicker thundered against "injustice in ways that sometimes shook the Senate rafters but always shamed the status quo."

Weicker briefly smiled when Kennedy talked about shaking the rafters.

Kennedy said Connecticut's 1991 tax battle was "vintage Weicker."

"He reviewed the economic facts of life and came to a principled decision," Kennedy said. "His state, caught in a downward spiral of debt and decline, could not continue on it's traditional anti-tax course, when that course had clearly failed."

Kennedy said Congress and the Bush administration, in struggling with the federal deficit, lack the political courage displayed by Weicker.

Seated in the audience was Thomas J. D'Amore Jr., Weicker's longtime friend and former chief of staff. D'Amore said Weicker deserved the award for his entire career in politics, but he found irony in the governor's being saluted for his budget stance.

"Doing what you're supposed to do is an act of courage?"

D'Amore said. "That's quite a state of affairs."

A half-dozen protesters stood at the edge of the libary grounds. One held a sign that said, "Profiles in Lying." Weicker had said during his campaign that he was not for an income tax, although he might consider one.

After the ceremony, Weicker came upon 100 children on a field trip from Illing Junior High School in Manchester, Conn. Joe DePasqua, a social studies teacher, said the trip was arranged without knowledge of the ceremony.

"You ought to go into politics," Weicker yelled to the children, pausing to shake a few hands.

"I want to be president," said 13-year-old Chad Gough.

"You can be anything you want to be," Weicker said. "But I'll tell you one thing. You've got more power to do more good things by being in public office, I don't care if it's at the town level or federal level."

"If you have good things you'd like to do in this country," Weicker said, "get into politics.